Notes: Today's is a good word for anyone or anything showing slowness as if from heaviness. It comes with an adverb, torpidly, and several nouns. Torpor is the most popular by far. However, torpidity still haunts the Oxford English Dictionary. If you don't like either of these, you might try torpitude, a rarity these days.

In Play: Feel free to use this word for anyone you see dragging along at work: "Gladys Friday seems unusually torpid today; anything bothering her?" It may be used with any abstract nouns normally associated with such adjectives as active, quick, and the like: "I love to read the memos from the boss to see what his torpid mind can come up with."

Word History: Today's Good Word was taken from Latin torpidus "benumbed" from torpere "be stiff, be numb". We snatched the noun, torpor, straight from Latin torpor "numbness, torpor", without so much as a fare-thee-well. Torpor comes from the Proto-Indo-European root (s)ter- "stiff" with a Fickle S. Greek retained the initial S in its word stereos "solid", a word which wandered into English in stereophonic (= solid sounding) to be later reduced to simply stereo. This root was transformed to tirpstu "to become rigid" in Lithuanian. In Old English it turned up in steorfan "to die", which did not make it down to Modern English. (We now bow in no torpid respect to Susan Ardith, who suggested today's slow-moving Good Word.)

For reasons that probably would not shock you, "torpedo" comes from the same Latin word for numbness; first came the ray (Torpediniformes) which numbs its victims with an electric shock , then the waterborne weapon which numbs with its brisance. On the sunny, less destructive side, hummingbirds are able to race around with a supercharged metabolism by conserving energy in a daily torpor or noctivation. See http://www.fws.gov/nwrs/threecolumn.aspx?id=2147491782Well, feeling a bit torpid. Time for my daily nap now...

Pepshort wrote:Wondering if there's a connection with 'stupor', and/or ultimately with either rigor (stiff) or mortis (death)

Ask a "stupor" question, get a "stupid" answer:

Other than the fact they all mean a form of numbness, I can't find one. Stupor is a deadness caused by a shock or blow, torpor is from some effect of heaviness, rigor is stiffness or hardness. (Gee, I wonder, is that why bodies are called "stiffs?" )

Stupid and stupor are related. They go back to the idea of having been struck senseless.

Life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own.